The world is watching

Who decides what’s news? And how do they decide? How much of what we see and read is fact? Fiction? And what of the men and women in the field; are foreign correspondents allowed to tell all that they see, or are they only employees, mouth-pieces for an invisible editorial line? “The world is watching” examines these issues by focusing on several journalists working in Nicaragua during the negotiations surrounding the Arias Peace Plan in November 1987. The filmmakers won unprecedented access to film inside ABC TV News – following a news crew on the ground in Nicaragua, while simultaneously documenting the editorial process in the ABC newsroom in New York City. “The world is watching” examines how the news business works – revealing the inevitable distortions that become part of the process. Journalists criticize their profession from the inside. They question the enormous pressures they face: the deadlines, the demand for sensationalism, and editorial decisions that are made far from the action. “The world is watching is a political film about newsgathering and news-making, one of the key moral issues of the electronic age.